“Lawfare is not something in which persons engage in the pursuit of justice, and must be defined as a negative phenomenon to have any real meaning. Otherwise, we risk diluting the threat and feeding the inability to distinguish between that which is the correct application of the law, on the one hand, and that which is lawfare, on the other. Because that is the essence of the issue here: how do we distinguish between that which constitutes a constructive, legitimate legal battle (even if the legal battle is against us and inconvenient) from that which is a counterproductive perversion of the law, which should be allocated no precedent? The delineation is not as simple as some may like to make it; that is, that lawsuits against terrorists are good, and legal actions against democracies are bad. The question is not ‘Who is the target?’ but ‘What is the intention?’ behind the legal action: Is it to pursue justice, to apply the law in the interests of freedom and democracy, or is the intent to undermine the very system of laws being manipulated?”

AT its face, their ISLAMIST dictates to Americans can be compared (on hyper steroids) to Mafioso families aiming to control America in toto, yet no one in authority demanding that they stand down – or else! In fact, CAIR was designated an “unindicted” co-conspirator in the largest terrorism trial in U.S. history, the Holy Land Foundation trial!

FBI Special Agent Lara Burns was going over more transcripts from the Philadelphia meeting — the 1993 gathering of Holy Land officials and Hamas sympathizers that the government contends was meant to brainstorm ways to downplay the Foundation’s extremist ties — when talk turned to a passage from defendant Shukri Abu Baker.

He is quoted on the wiretap transcript talking about how it would be beneficial to have more traditional, secular American organizations to help spread the Islamist message.

He and others envisioned an “alternative” organization “which can benefit from a new atmosphere, one whose Islamic hue is not very conspicuous,” he said according to the transcript.

Prosecutor Barry Jonas asked Burns whether any groups formed after the Philadelphia gathering fit this mold. “CAIR,” she said.

CAIR is one of about 300 unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land case, and testimony has shown that its founder, Omar Ahmad, and current executive director, Nihad Awad, both participated in the Philadelphia meeting.

“Just to be sure,” he said, raising up a large posterboard with the name “Council on American-Islamic Relations” scrawled across it, “this is the one with the inconspicuous Islamist hue?”

+ Later Tuesday, Burns’ counterpart, FBI Special Agent Robert Miranda, began his testimony detailing the type of people Holy Land routinely called on to speak at its fundraisers in the U.S.

He and prosecutor Jim Jacks went through a list of Holy Land speakers, seized from a computer at its Richardson offices in 2001, and compared it to lists of known Hamas members and associates.

They found dozens of matches of names and phone numbers among Holy Land speakers and a roster of Hamas members found at the Mississippi apartment of unindicted coconspirator Abdelhaleem Ashqar. Holy Land speakers’ names also showed up in the address book of Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook, who has extensive ties financially and personally to many of the defendants.

Defense attorneys and their clients grinned and looked at each other every time Miranda referred to the owner of the address book as “the terrorist Marzook.”

Among those on Holy Land’s speakers list are Mahmoud al-Zahar (a Hamas co-founder), Jamil Hamami, Mohammed Siam and Hamed Bitawi. All of them are listed on a huge chart prosecutors made for jurors titled “Hamas Leaders In The 1990s.”

The Holy Land speakers list also shared some names in a pamphlet outlining the roster of candidates for Jordan’s Islamic Action Front political party. The group is, like Hamas, an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Miranda testified. Their platform, according to the pamphlet, says basically that Palestine must be wrested from Israeli occupation through jihad. The FBI found the pamphlet at Holy Land’s offices.

Miranda and Jacks then began going through speaker activity sheets and other records, connecting fundraising appearances by these Hamas-affiliated speakers and money in Holy Land coffers.

AND for much needed visual context, here’s the best rendition of CAIR and its tentacled Brotherhood Mafia:

IN this regard, how Orwellian is it to find out the following: CAIR still believes (after 6 years and ongoing) that they can prevail over the MAIN counter terrorism operative, Dave Gaubatz, who exposed their ISLAMIST ties for all the world to see with the aid of his team of investigators. (Full disclosure: permission was granted, a while back, to reveal the close nexus between this investigative journalist and Dave Gaubatz,otherwise said relationship would NEVER have seen the light of day.)

CAIR filed suit in 2009 against former federal investigator Dave Gaubatz and his son, Chris Gaubatz, after the two published their findings in the WND Books expose’“Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Later, CAIR added to the suit the Washington, D.C., think tankCenter for Security Policyand three of its employees for their part in commissioning a documentary about CAIR. Also added was attorney David Yerusalmi and his non-profit group SANE, which campaigns against the advance of Islamic law, or Shariah.

D.C. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered March 6 that the defendants’ motion for summary judgment – which would resolve the case based on the merits – be granted in part and denied in part.

The judge ordered the parties to inform the court by April 1 if they wish to resolve the remaining issues through mediation or through a trial.

Attorney Daniel Horowitz, who represents the Gaubatzes, told WND a trial will likely be set for next year, and the case will not settle unless CAIR dismisses and pays the Gaubatzes’ attorney’s fees.

He said his defense “will include the argument that CAIR cannot suffer damages because a member of a criminal terror conspiracy cannot collect damages when this participation is exposed.”

He also intends to inform the jury that the head of CAIR has claimed to be the Muslim Martin Luther King Jr., even though he refuses to renounce terror and did not recognize the name of King’s wife, Coretta.

“Muslim Mafia” documents CAIR’s support of radical jihad, recounting its origin as a front group for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, the worldwide movement that has stated its intent to transform the U.S. into a Saudi-style Islamic state.

CAIR alleges it suffered damage after the younger Gaubatz, posing as an intern, obtained access to some 12,000 pages of CAIR internal documents under false pretenses and made recordings of officials and employees without consent.

But Kollar-Kotelly has now eliminated from the case any claim that the publication of the material or the transmission it was in itself wrongful, meaning CAIR cannot claim it caused damages.

The judge threw out CAIR’s charges of conversion, breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, fraud and misappropriation of trade secrets.

CAIR’s trespass claim was eliminated for all defendants except for Chris Gaubatz, meaning CSP employees Adam Savit and Sarah Pavlis have been completely dismissed from the case.

Charges under the federal and District of Columbia Wiretap Acts and under the Stored Communications Act remain against Chris Gaubatz, David Gaubatz, CSP, CSP employee Christine Brim, Yerushalmi and SANE.

Horowitz explained to WND that the judge maintained counts that relate to matters of public importance: the privacy of computer information and the question of when it is or is not lawful to record someone.

“She did not decide whether we acted lawfully in protection of the Constitution or not,” Horowitz said. “That she left to the jury.”

One year ago, Kollar-Kotelly addressed CAIR’s formation of two separate legal entities that it has used interchangeably, the CAIR Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and the CAIR Action Network, a lobbying organization that actually is a shell, removing CAIR Action Network from the case.

Yerushalmi has explained that CAIR dissolved into two separate organizations after it faced accusations following Sept. 11 that it was funded by oil sheiks and other foreign supporters of terrorism.

Meanwhile, CAIR’s national organization in the nation’s capital continued to promote its organization as if it were a single entity founded in 1994.

Yerushalmi said CAIR used a maze of shell-corporations and several real estate holding companies to purchase properties with money from oil-rich sources in the Arab Gulf states.

The IRS was unaware, he said, that CAIR was operating a fraudulent scheme in which it sheltered millions of dollars of illicit funding by moving money between the shell corporations while insisting there is only one organization.

Yerushalmi has said that as a result of CAIR’s “dizzying array of cover-ups and fraudulent activities,” it “has no coherent basis for explaining the structure and nature of its operations, much less the status of Chris Gaubatz when he interned with the organization.”

He explained that CAIR has claimed all along that Chris Gaubatz interned with CAIR Action Network, but he insisted that’s impossible, because CAIR Action Network “is a shell organization without any staff or operations.”

In the course of the litigation, CAIR, with the court poised to dismiss the lawsuit, changed its claim, contending that Chris Gaubatz actually interned with CAIR Foundation.

In 2008, Chris Gaubatz was trained by his father to work undercover as an intern with CAIR’s national office in Washington, D.C. Chris wore an audio-video recorder on his clothing to obtain recordings of the routine activities of a CAIR intern.

Shortly after “Muslim Mafia” was published, CAIR filed its lawsuit alleging violations of various federal wiretap and hacking statutes along with several common law torts, such as breach of fiduciary duty and trespass.

FBI wiretap evidence from the Holy Land case showed CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad was at an October 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders and activists in Philadelphia. CAIR, according to the evidence, was born out of a need to give a “media twinkle” to the Muslim leaders’ agenda of supporting violent jihad abroad while slowly institutionalizing Islamic law in the U.S.

AsWND reported in 2010, a federal judge later determined that the Justice Department provided “ample evidence” to designate CAIR as an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator, affirming the Muslim group has been involved in “a conspiracy to support Hamas.”

WND reported in March 2013 that Kollar-Kotelly rebuked CAIR and its in-house legal counsel for their “inability to efficiently manage their discovery in this matter and to comply with the court’s scheduling and procedures order.”

Horowitz said at the time that the judge’s rebuke supports the claim that the Muslim lobby group was abusing the court system in an attempt to silence opposition.

In the lawsuit, CAIR does not defend itself against the claims of the book, “Muslim Mafia,” and the FBI seized the CAIR material from the Washington law office of one of the Gaubtazes’ three high-profile lawyers. A previous filing in the case revealed a federal grand jury was investigating CAIR for possible violation of laws that ban financial dealings with terrorist groups or countries under U.S. sanctions.

AT least for now, until further developments warrant reporting (likely sooner than later), this investigative journalist rests her case and incontrovertible indictment against CAIR and its tentacled Mafia!